Verus Offers 1,350 ETH Bounty To Bridge Exploiter For Fund Return

Verus has sent an onchain message to the Verus-Ethereum Bridge exploiter, offering a 1,350 ETH bounty if most of the missing funds are returned within 24 hours. The message was recorded on Ethereum at 2:12:59 p.m. UTC on May 21 and was sent to the address labeled by Etherscan as Verus Exploiter 2.

The proposed settlement asks for 4,052.4 ETH to be returned to 0xF9AB28cB7b72B518e6a351FbdaBe69362cBC1A74. At the ETH price shown on Etherscan during the transaction review, the requested return was worth about $8.64 million, while the 1,350 ETH bounty was worth about $2.88 million.

Verus community members and developers said they would treat the retained 1,350 ETH as a legitimate bounty if the exploiter follows the terms. The message also says the group would stop existing investigations to the best of its ability, avoid initiating new investigations, avoid pressing charges and publicly acknowledge the retained funds as a bounty.

The offer does not guarantee that law enforcement, exchanges, infrastructure providers or other third parties would be bound by the same terms. It is still a recovery proposal from the Verus side, delivered publicly onchain, with the exploiter’s agreement tied to returning the requested 4,052.4 ETH before the deadline.

Bridge Recovery Enters Negotiation Stage

The bounty offer follows the suspicious $11.5 million Verus-Ethereum Bridge drain earlier this week. That incident moved 1,625.36 ETH, 103.56 tBTC and 147,658 USDC from the bridge contract to one receiving wallet, before the assets were later consolidated into roughly 5,402.4 ETH.

The latest message turns the case from pure tracking into an active recovery negotiation. Verus is offering the exploiter a roughly 25% bounty while asking for about 75% of the consolidated ETH to come back. That split is large for a traditional bug bounty, but major post-exploit negotiations often use higher retention amounts when stolen funds are already consolidated, difficult to freeze or likely to move through privacy tools.

A similar recovery pattern appeared in the Renegade dark-pool incident, where an onchain negotiation led to most assets being returned and a smaller bounty retained. The Verus case is larger and more sensitive because it involves cross-chain bridge reserves, tBTC exposure, ETH liquidity and a public recovery offer tied to a 24-hour window.

Bridge incidents remain one of DeFi’s highest-risk categories. Earlier CryptoAdventure coverage tracked how major bridge exploits have cost the crypto sector hundreds of millions of dollars this year, with recovery outcomes depending on rapid tracing, exchange coordination, freezeable assets, legal pressure and whether the exploiter chooses negotiation over laundering.

The next verifiable event is onchain movement. A return of 4,052.4 ETH to the specified address would turn the Verus case into a partial recovery with a publicly recognized bounty. No return by the deadline would leave investigators tracking the full 5,402.4 ETH position and any downstream transfers, swaps, mixer use, exchange deposits or bridge attempts tied to the exploiter wallet.

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